The present invention relates to the transmission and reception of data and, in particular, to method for generating and inserting signaling information in a datastream to be transmitted, an apparatus for assembling a datastream, a method for obtaining and exploiting the signaling information in a received datastream, a receiver, and a datastream. Further embodiments of the present invention relate to an efficient two-stage signaling and framing concept for spreading.
The present invention deals with an efficient signaling of specific parameters within any multiplexing scheme. Any multiplexing scheme using FEC coded transmission which can be (but not limited to) reconfigured freely on a codeword-by-codeword basis necessitates signaling attached to each code word.
In signaling schemes of a transmission system like e.g. DVB-S2 (second generation DVB System for satellite broadcasting and unicasting, DVB: Digital Video Broadcasting) with a time-division multiplex (TDM), a physical-layer-header (PLH) of fixed modulation and coding for signaling of information about the subsequent data frame is defined. Since this header is necessitated to be decodable within a wide range of channel conditions, this header is designed to be decodable under specified worst-case-conditions. Commonly, this header is necessitated to be at least as robust as the most robust transmission scheme. This leads to two disadvantages:                In case of good reception conditions, the level of protection is too high, which corresponds to unnecessitated overhead.        Secondly, any extension of the system to work at even worse reception conditions other than originally specified necessitates a redesign of the header, resulting even in an extra overhead as more static redundancy is needed for the header.        